“As fighters, we never should have been able to get our own sponsors,” Sonnen today told MMAjunkie Radio. “No executive producers of a show, whether it’s the silver screen or your television set, allows paid talent to come in and then have outside sponsors. If you watch ‘Saturday Night Live’ and a guy shows up in a Nike shirt, you can bet your ass that NBC got the check for that Nike shirt and had wardrobe put it on that talent. Nowhere in the world does this happen.
“If you pay for the camera and the lights and venues and take all the risk and are the entrepreneurs, you get all of the revenue. (UFC President) Dana White broke that cycle a number of years ago because the UFC was so small that he was ashamed of what he was having to pay his guys. So he said, ‘Get money wherever you can. I’ll approve every sponsor, and I want you guys to have every dollar.’ I was there when he gave that speech to the fighters in 2005.”
Eventually (fighters getting own sponsors was) going to go away, but it never should have been there in the first place, and that’s the part people are forgetting,” Sonnen said. “Now, you get a major sponsor like Reebok. Imagine if that happened with any other executive producer of a television program. They’re going to get the money. Instead, the UFC is paying it back out, and people say, ‘Oh, that’s not enough.’ That’s normal human psychology. I’m not turning on the athletes, and I’m not trying to be a corporate guy here, but if you’re going to be objective, we should have never been allowed sponsors in the first place. That’s the part people are missing.
You’re looking around at what some guys are losing. Other guys are laughing all the way to the bank. But the bottom line is, we’re not entitled to that money. We’re hired under somebody else’s dime. It doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world – sport world or entertainment world – except the UFC.”
